


unbeing dead isn't being alive

by scribbleb_red



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Andrew Minyard can't die, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Nor can Neil, POV Andrew Minyard, Protectiveness, Romantic Soulmates, Smoking, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-26 00:34:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20733317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribbleb_red/pseuds/scribbleb_red
Summary: Andrew Minyard can’t die - he’s been killed a number of times. Once by Drake, once in the car with Tilda, he should have bled out after being stabbed by one of the men who bashed Nicky... he always wakes up though.Which is why he takes a bullet for Neil Josten, a perfect stranger (and Andrew really means ‘perfect’).Problem: instead of fleeing the scene after being saved, Neil sees a bullet push itself back out of Andrew’s skull.“You’re like me,” Neil says.And Andrew’s whole world shifts on its axis.





	1. it’s not the world that’s cruel.

**Chapter I **

** _It’s not the world that’s cruel._ **

*

Being shot in the head, Andrew decided, was a terribly inconvenient way to die.

It made waking up again such a chore.

Everything was cambering in and out of focus. Blood had glued the lashes of Andrew’s left eye. When he succeeded in opening it, red stripes clouded his vision. More blood was in his ears and mouth. The injury to his temple felt like one of Renee’s knives buried into his skull.

It was worse than the time Drake choked him to death, leaving fingerprints around Andrew’s punished throat and an inability to swallow for hours.

It was worse than bleeding out in the car next to Tilda, which had almost been peaceful.

It was infinitely worse than the stabbing that killed him in outside of Eden’s Twilight, which at least had the benefit of giving him a decent defence for his own brutality – try to convict a five-nothing white boy who grew up in foster care and just wanted to protect his gay cousin and somehow ‘only lived because of a miracle’. The jury was never going to work out in anyone’s favour but Andrew’s, and the judge knew it. Case dismissed.

But this.

This was _pain, pain, pain._ A sick pitching in his stomach. A knotted rope pulling at his brain.

Lying in the gutter, he tried to work out how much time had passed. Andrew took small sips of air, pacing his lungs as he’d learnt to do through his various deaths and awakenings. The last thing he remembered was the click of the trigger, the crack of the bullet, then silence. Whiteness. The colour of bone. The colour of a blank page.

Now there was just lights, shadows, the murmur of a main road somewhere nearby. 

“You’re awake.”

Andrew flinched, hard enough to send agony jouncing from his skull to his toes, every bone in his body seeming to catch light and burn. He caught the moan between his teeth, biting down on his lower lip until the agony simmered down, reducing to heat and embers. Spiteful. Constant.

A boy-shape rose from the gloom in Andrew’s bloodied eye. Andrew tried to place him. As with his other deaths, his memory was only able to provide flashes from the few minutes before dying. The full picture would come back eventually but not immediately. Still there were snippets:

_A beautiful throat. Freckles. Glacier blue eyes begging him to stop talking. A sob like an open fracture. A blond woman with a grin that spelled damnation. The snickering-snack of a barrel locking into place. _

Andrew let his eyes close. Nausea in his stomach. Pain punching a hole in his head.

“You’re like me,” the strange boy said.

Andrew didn’t open his eyes, but his throat convulsed. The world was tilting again, swooping dangerously to the right or maybe it was left or maybe it was up or down or sideways. Andrew couldn’t tell. All he knew was cold sweat running between his shoulder blades. Noise stuffing his head with so much pain his skull was about to split open, spilling his brain over the floor as easily as the bullet. His hands scrabbled at the ground, weak twitches as he tried to stop the spinning.

“Hey now, hang in there, you’re good.”

_Every word was a knife. _

“It’s all right. Lie still. Yeah, there you go, just stay still a little longer. It’s going to be okay. It’ll pass quicker if you’re still. Admittedly, never been shot in the head before but I did take a knife through my eye once. Good thing the wounds that kill us don’t leave scars huh? One eye would be a bit distinctive.”

_Shut up. Shut up. Shut up, _said the part of his brain that had been shot.

But the other part was focusing on the phrases: _You’re like me_,_ a knife through the eye, don’t leave scars_.

He could smell the stranger now – vetiver and gun-smoke, a sharp tang of sweat underneath. He felt the slide of a memory trying to take shape: a frozen, golden second where he’d collided with a man on the street – _terrified blue eyes, freckles on his nose, a curl of autumn-red hair sticking to his sweaty forehead._

“I’m going to have to go now,” said the stranger. “But thank you, for what you did. For protecting me. I promise you won’t see any repercussions. No one will find out about you from me.”

Andrew wanted to reach out, wanted to open his eyes, and tell the man to stay. He wanted answers. He needed them.

“Um, here’s your bullet by the way.” There was a brush of warmth over Andrew’s hand, something cold and heavy against his palm. “I don’t know what you do with your talismans but figure you’ll want to keep it safe. Hang in there, okay?”

When he heard the tell-tale slap of a fleet-footed runner growing further away, Andrew clenched his hand around the bullet and told himself the wrench in his gut was just part of the nausea. 

It wasn’t loss. Not a chance.


	2. the moment you stop being the rabbit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was six months since Andrew took a bullet to the temple and couldn’t speak for three days. 
> 
> Anomic aphasia, Aaron called it (accurate but useless as ever). 
> 
> Concussion, Abby had diagnosed, incorrectly (but B+ for effort). 
> 
> A loose end, Andrew concluded, when he finally gained back his power over language. A conundrum, a puzzle, an enigma, a riddle, a mystery more enticing than the Gordian Knot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Mentions of past assault, character death (even if they can't die) and suicidal ideation.

**Chapter II **

** _The moment you stop being the rabbit_**

*

He thought he imagined it: the impossibly familiar voice in the tiny bookshop, spilling around the stacks like a wave washing up against the shore.

It was six months since Andrew took a bullet to the temple and couldn’t speak for three days.

_Anomic aphasia_, Aaron called it (accurate but useless as ever).

_Concussion_, Abby had diagnosed, incorrectly (but B+ for effort).

_A loose end_, Andrew concluded, when he finally gained back his power over language. _A conundrum, a puzzle, an enigma, a riddle, a mystery more enticing than the Gordian Knot. _

“Can you stop being adorable for one minute and come back here.”

And now there was that voice – the one from the alley, the one that belonged to a young man with hair like the leaves in October and eyes like flax and apparently the same inability to die as Andrew. But who was he talking to? Who would make his voice sound so light, so full of affection? And what was he doing in Palmetto?

“You’re not helpful, you know. You’re an endless nuisance. I don’t know why they keep you.”

Andrew crept along the stacks, peering through the shelves, trying to catch a glimpse of the man who’d placed a used bullet in his palm and left him to reanimate behind some bins in an alley.

_Found you_, Andrew thought as he spotted a head of auburn curls. It was really him. The stranger from the was crouched down like a frog, knees almost by his ears, apparently trying to coax a very large calico cat out from behind a bookcase. A tail of mostly fluff flicked in irritation as the stranger made a noise between his teeth like a small rodent nibbling at stale biscuits.

“That’s not going to work.” Andrew stepped out of the stacks, smug when he saw the flinch.

He wasn’t expecting the man to fly upright, to spin like a whirlwind, to trip over a pile of books and come careening towards him, face-planting into his chest with a yelp. Andrew’s hands flew up to grip the man’s elbows, steadying him, pushing him back, out of his space. The smell of vetiver was still there and something citrusy and slightly woody, though the gunsmoke was gone.

“So, it is you.” Andrew flicked his eyes over the man’s face. Bones sharp as he remembered, hard edges still softened by the universe of freckled skin. It was a good thing he had those killer cheekbones because there was nothing interesting about the stranger’s dress sense. Ratty grey jumper patched at the elbows. Rattier black skinny jeans ripped in the knees.

The man struggled to find words, stumbled over the beginning of a sentence again and again. Wildness had roared to life in his eyes, his breathing catching like his lungs were snagging on his ribs, his attention darting around the room for the exits but never straying too far from Andrew. It was as if he thought Andrew were a predator, someone to fear rather than the man who died and came back to life for a perfect stranger.

“If you hadn’t just been talking to King Fluffkins, I think you’d also taken a headshot recently,” Andrew said, when it became clear no words were going to be forthcoming. “Come on, use your words.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Buying books.” Andrew waved his hand around the shop.

Cat’s Cradle was one of the best second-hand bookshops in the country, and one of Palmetto’s best kept secrets. He’d found collector’s editions of Whitman in here, tattered and loved copies of Eliot.

That and when the weather was wicking towards another summer storm, King Fluffkins and Sir Fatcat McCatterson were far better companions than Aaron or Nicky or Kevin.

“You live here?”

Andrew could hear the growing agitation. Another man might have taken pity, but Andrew Minyard didn’t deal in small kindnesses. “I live and occasionally die here. But you know all about that.”

“Look, I’ll leave. I’ll go. I wasn’t going to stay long anyway. I didn’t realise you were here.”

“Why would you realise? I took a bullet to the brain for you and then you left me in the gutter.”

“I stayed until you were awake. I had to get rid of her body.”

Ah, yes. _Her_. The blond with the magenta smile, who hadn’t been expecting Andrew to appear out of nowhere and stab her, who’d fired a bullet into Andrew’s skull instead of pretty boy’s chest. “She did die then?”

“Yes. She wasn’t like us…”

_Us_. Now there was a word Andrew never expected to hear. _Us_. Confirmation that there were other people like him. Who died and died and died – and yet kept breathing.

Blue eyes flicked to the door behind Andrew’s head and Andrew tilted his head to disrupt the view. “Look, I can leave,” he said again. “I can leave. I’ll go.”

“No one is telling you to go, but I’m sensing you’re a runner.” If those calves were anything to go by, pretty boy was also pretty dedicated to the activity. “Thing is you owe me, and I want you to tell me everything you fucking know about our condition and how to fix it.”

“Fix it? You can’t fix it.” The answer was immediate. The accompanying stare, perplexed.

It was exactly what Andrew always feared. That didn’t mean he was going to stop looking for a solution. “Then tell me everything you know.”

There was a thoughtful pause where their gazes collided in blue and gold. “Do you even know what we are?”

Andrew raised an eyebrow. There was that collective pronoun again, _we_. “Nope.”

“Then this isn’t just a quick conversation. Look, I’ve got to work, we can talk after.”

More like he needed to time to plan his escape. Andrew was having none of that.

“I came here to read. I’ll wait until you’re done.” 

“I can meet you somewhere nearby.”

"Do you take me for a fool? I’ll be over there." Andrew said, pointing at his usual nook near the door before giving a two-fingered salute. "Don't run off, okay?"

"Wouldn't dream of it."

Andrew heard the lie, but he had a sneaking suspicion that the stranger wasn’t lying to him, but to himself. Somewhere in the undertow, he was just as intrigued by Andrew’s reappearance in his life as Andrew was. Those eyes might be too blue to be fully human, but they weren’t dishonest. They were windows letting in too much light.

*

The rest of the afternoon passed in a hyper-aware haze of good books and cold, sweet coffee. Specks of dust swirled and eddied in the gold afternoon light. At some point Sir Fatcat – the original namesake of the Cat’s Cradle bookshop – came to purr on Andrew’s lap. He rolled his fingers through the long fur, feeling out the knots and teasing them flat. The stranger passed by Andrew’s nook infrequently, but always watchful when he did. On the fifth or sixth time, Andrew lost patience with the idea of calling him ‘stranger’ in his head.

“What do I call you?” He asked, not looking up from the page, wetting his finger to turn a particularly tricky corner.

There was a beat of silence. “Neil will do.”

_Neil_. A gaelic name, derived from the word for _cloud_. Andrew hummed. Probably wasn’t his real name, his true name. But that didn’t matter.

“What about you?”

“Andrew.”

Neil hovered, eyes sticking fixed on Andrew whilst he fidgeted from foot to foot, hands clenching and unclenching. Andrew could feel Neil’s attention like a physical weight. He didn’t hate it. It was almost entertaining.

“Staring.” Andrew drawled.

And he couldn’t help his smirk when Neil flushed, scowled and stormed away, clearly biting his cheek to stop from saying something he’d regret.

They danced around each other until closing – Neil doing his best to avoid Andrew’s nook, despite the tiny size of the shop; Andrew doing his best to catch Neil’s attention with a languorous stretch here or a snicker there, delighting when he made Neil twitch.

A handful of customers wove in and out, shadows between the stacks, voices like streams as they burbled away to Neil about the books they were looking for. Andrew didn’t care. He tuned in occasionally when he heard the ire in Neil’s voice rise. Turned out there was a wide river of snark rushing underneath Neil’s skin.

“Yes, it’s entirely my fault,” he was saying to a middle-aged woman who was complaining about a having picked up book – just last week, that happened to contain (shock horror) a _homosexual _romance. _Can you believe it, selling such filth_? – Neil hummed. “Absolutely ma’am. Entirely my fault as your bookseller. I am the dickhead fairy and I sprinkled asshole dust all over your copy of Brokeback Mountain, turning it gay, just for you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ma’am, it’s a best-selling gay romance book that was turned in a major motion picture. It’s shelved in our rainbow-decorated LGBTQ+ section and has two cowboys on the front with the tagline ‘Love is a force of nature’. You’ll have to forgive my mistake in selling it to you.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“I rarely laugh, ma’am.”

“You are. You are mocking me, trying to make me feel bad about not wanting to… to… to put up with this immorality.”

“Immorality is a big word, but if you would like me to relieve you of the big, bad, gay book, then by all means feel free to donate it back to the shop. We don’t have a returns policy.”

The woman huffed, heffed, shook; whole body trembling next to a very still, very calm Neil.

“Are you calling me homophobic?” she demanded. “I simply don’t want to read this kind of thing. I would like to swap this book for a better one.”

“I didn’t say that.” Neil’s voice never rose, it was agonisingly patient. "And you’re not phobic, you’re not scared enough. No, you’re ignorant.”

Neil gentled the book out of her grasp and offered her the most softly sinister smile that Andrew had ever seen. Goosebumps nettled down his neck.

“Fortunately,” Neil continued. “Bookshops are known for curing your particular ailment. Perhaps you’d like to try reading _Red, White and Royal Blue_, it’s all about prejudice and ignorance. Seems perfect for you.”

Fury surrounded the woman like a heat haze. She shook on the spot for a moment more before turning on her heel with a thousand threats aimed directly at Neil spewing from her mouth. The manager would hear about this. The shop would be closed if it was the last thing she did. There would be complaints, young man. _So rude. _

Andrew watched as Neil ran a hand over the cover of Proulx’s book, as if to sooth it after being the centre of such an argument.

“I’m going to put this one back and then close up,” Neil said, obviously noting that Andrew was listening in. “You ready to go in ten?”

Andrew was more than ready.

The keys jangled as Neil pocketed them, indicating to Andrew to follow him with his head. He was living above the shop, apparently, but the entrance to the flat was through a side door around the back. The set up was curious, given Andrew had though that the owner lived above the store, but Neil only shrugged at the non-question, choosing not to explain why he had apparently stepped straight into another man’s existence. 

Coffee was made. Andrew watched Neil with renewed suspicion when he saw that he took it strong, black and sugarless. He deliberately added oatmilk and dumped an extra spoonful or three of sugar into his own coffee just to balance them out.

Neil ushered them into a tiny living room, curling himself into a large wingback chair, knees drawn onto the seat.

_Shrinking_, Andrew thought, _making himself smaller, less of a target_.

Andrew took the sofa, keeping himself loose-limbed, relaxed, able to spring into action at a moment’s notice. When he sat, it was onto something uncomfortable. He pulled out a book. _Grief _by Andrew Holleran.

There was a beat, a pause, the room seeming to slow as the two of them waited for the other to speak. Seconds ticked so slowly by it was like time was stuck in syrup. But Andrew had practice in being quiet, had perfected the art in fact. Reserve gave everyone the distinct impression that he was more in control than he was, more dangerous too. It suited him far better than it did Neil.

“Just so you know, I’m only doing this because you’re one of us and you saved me,” Neil said, caving to Andrew’s silence. 

Andrew quirked an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t have died.”

“She wasn’t trying to kill me.”

Andrew filed that titbit away to ask about later.

“I’ve never met someone who didn’t know what they were before,” Neil said. There was a pensive tilt to his mouth. “Information was passed down in my family.”

“We’re not related.” Andrew could not handle another surprise blood relative.

“Oh, no, definitely not. You just have some ancient blood in you somewhere. We all do.”

“You keep saying ‘we’, explain what that means.”

“People like us.”

Was Neil being deliberately facetious? Andrew thought he might be.

His jaw ticked. “Start with _what_, and then tell me _why_.” They could come to _who, how_, and _when_ later. 

“We’re human,” Neil said. “But different.”

Andrew rolled his eyes. “Obviously. Most people die and stay dead.”

“They call us the Koschei – the Deathless Ones. We’re human, but generally there’s a trigger – a first death that changes us. Brings out our blood.”

Andrew returned to the silence, enjoying the way Neil floundered over his explanations, the way his brows furrowed and twitched. There was a nick in his left eyebrow. Andrew wondered if it belonged to the eye that was stabbed.

“It’s like we’re… well, it’s like being a rock.” Neil said. “You know the ones that are formed under huge pressure and heat, compacting and changing until their literal chemistry is different?”

“A metamorphic rock.”

“I guess?” Neil didn’t look sure. “The point is, that’s how we’re made. I’m guessing your first death would have been slow; you were probably scared and desperate. You struggled, fought. That’s the pressure we face to become Koschei. We die, slowly. But we’re fighting to survive.” 

Andrew thought of Drake’s hands around his throat. “I have never wanted to live,” he said.

Neil blinked, began to ramble. “Do you want to die though? Suicidal ideation isn’t uncommon in our kind, most of us face violence, but most don’t really want to die. You might want to stop existing, make the pain stop, and death seems like the way out – especially since we can’t have it – but really death’s just a means to an end, not an actual desire.”

“Are you trying to tell me how I feel?”

“No. But there’s a difference, right? Between wanting to die and thinking it’d be better if you didn’t exist.” Neil didn’t stammer. He didn’t seem worried about Andrew’s desire to be able to die. In fact, there was a nonchalance to the way Neil spoke about death, about suicide, that left a sour taste in Andrew’s mouth.

Neil had been there, Andrew realised, he’d reached that breaking point too. Reached it and clung onto life anyway. Determined life worth holding onto, no matter how it cut his palms or ripped out his nails.

“How did you become this?” Andrew asked.

“Drowned. In a bathtub.” Neil hunched a little more into his knees, eyes an ocean full of ghosts.

And Andrew had the sneaking suspicion that just like Drake’s hands that choked the life out of him, someone else had held Neil down, forced his head below the surface whilst his body thrashed and writhed and screamed for air.

“Are there many of us?”

Neil shook his head. “It’s not easy to become us – but there are people in the US who know enough to try and make us.” Neil’s face crumpled, frowned. “You don’t know about them.”

“Them?”

Blankness flattened Neil’s expression, a pebble worn smooth by time and brutality. It was like seeing a puppet’s strings being cut, something horrible and ruinous.

“That woman was one of them, wasn’t she? You said she wasn’t trying to kill you.” Andrew said, pieces slotting together in his head.

“Yes,” said Neil.

“She was hunting you.”

“Yes." 

“Why?”

“You can’t figure that one out?”

“Enlighten me.”

“You really know nothing. How haven’t you been found?” There was a treble of hysteria, a bass note of wonderment.

Andrew shrugged.

Neil stared and stared. His wiry frame loosened and tensed, the coils of a snake, the flightiness of a rabbit.

“You’ve just been living all this time.”

“Unfortunately.”

Anger flared and Neil’s teeth flashed. “We can’t die. We don’t get sick. Why do you think people hunt us? We’re walking body bags – they can drain our blood, take our organs, experiment on us to their hearts desire. As soon as the damage kills us, we just _come back for more_. We're worth billions if they keep and kill us correctly.”

That explained the woman hunting Neil in Columbia.

How long had Neil been running from her? From _them_?

Where had he been before?

Why did none of this – from their first meeting to this irregular reunion – feel like a coincidence?

He didn't trust Neil. Neil was a threat. A liability. He could bring these hunters to Andrew's door, rupture the delicate balance afforded by the deals he'd struck with Wymack and the Foxes and his twin.

And yet...

Andrew considered the day they crashed into each other – the way Neil startled, bruises under his eyes, pale as the dead. The way he’d looked at Andrew and instead of bustling by whispered two words: _cover me. _

He hadn't trusted Neil then either. He had known immediately, instinctually, that this stranger was trouble. Still he'd followed. Still he'd fought. Still he'd taken that bullet. 

Maybe it was the peculiarity of the request, maybe it was the way he reminded Andrew of a painting – all angles and preternatural colours glowing in the lamplight – but that didn’t explain why Andrew decided to take a bullet for a perfect stranger.

Or maybe what had drawn Andrew after Neil wasn’t human at all. Maybe it was this _different _inside them both. The part of them that was Koschei. Andrew remembered how he felt that night, like he was being _pulled_ after Neil – dragged by determination to know more, and then inspired by fury at seeing Neil cornered, pinned against the wall with a knife under his chin.

From the moment they collided, there’d been a tug in Andrew’s belly, a fishhook digging just below his sternum, binding them together, bringing them to this moment, to this room.

Like fate.

Like a promise.

“This was why you were going to run, because these people know what you are.”

Neil nodded. “You’re lucky no one has clocked you yet.”

_Lucky_ wasn’t the word Andrew would use but today wasn’t the day for semantics. “Do they know where you are?”

“I wouldn’t still be here if they did.”

Andrew hummed. For all that Neil was every inch a lie, Andrew knew what Neil was offering was real – that all this talk of ancient blood and hunters was true. “How cold is your trail?”

“Cold enough. It won’t be hard for me to disappear.”

“Then what would it take for you to stay?”

“Excuse me?” That frown was back – adorable furrows and all.

“Give your back to me,” Andrew said. Where the words were coming from, he didn't know, but the idea of Neil leaving had the lure burying deeper into his chest, painful and twisting and impossible to ignore. “Stay here. Teach me about all this. Let me protect you from whoever these people are.”

“They’re not people, they’re monsters. I can’t…”

“You can.”

“I barely know you.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Andrew said. “But I’ll give you this for free. When I make a promise, I don’t break it. My word is my law. I will keep you safe if you stay.”

Neil looked like he wanted to shake apart. And then he gave the smallest nod of his head, enough to just tousle the curls on his head. The tentative hope on his face made Andrew’s stomach hurt.

Unthinking, Andrew reached out, pressed two fingers to Neil's throat, checking his pulse.

When Neil tried to bat him away, Andrew caught his wrist with his free hand. His smile was all teeth as he leaned forward into Neil's space. "Remember this feeling. This is the moment you stop being the rabbit." 

Neil twisted in Andrew’s grip, moving so he was clasping Andrew in return, his bare fingers brushing Andrew’s naked wrist in an echo of the day Neil gave him the bullet that cracked through his skull.

Skin to skin, Andrew felt something in his chest loosen. The warm touch a blossom lifting its head to the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts, feels, hit me!

**Author's Note:**

> Well, you asked for it. Here is the AU in which Andrew keeps dying but doesn't stay dead. And it turns out Neil doesn't either. 
> 
> Thoughts, feelings, hit me. You know I live for your comments.


End file.
